Let’s bail . . .

We’ve maintained a years-long, offline conversation about social media and digital engagement, in which we’ve contemplated various tools for digital expressions and curation—ranging from personal blogs, RSS, and Twitter (and it’s clones)—as public goods. In recent months and weeks I find myself coalescing more and more around these three points on the path of that conversation:

• making the internet easy for everyone is not the greatest idea;
• requiring folks to come to digital spaces with some expertise or a willingness to tinker and learn is essential to making digital spaces less toxic and less embittered, because doing so will impress upon them a lot of the complexities of which they may currently be unaware;
• large platforms that attempt to collect everyone into the same space, while having some plus sides, are a huge net negative and present an illusion of community that is in no way reflected in the way humans actually engage meaninfully with one another.

These are all developing thoughts, but watching Musk-Twitter, Reddit’s recent moves, and the rise of Mastodon and Threads, it’s hard not to see a lot of good people struggling against barriers that were erected as means to more efficiently manage large masses of people who were often herded into a digital space they may or may not have been all that excited to join in the first place.